Starfish Cast #2 - Thibaut, the Konsensus Powerhouse

Yeah.

If I remember correct. And also the timeline is a bit unclear in my head. That was during 2020? Well, the book, the Dutch version launched in December of 2020. And I was at that time, I was writing a bit for my blog that I started. Maybe I should go back a little bit more about how I found Bitcoin and how we ended up here, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Why don't you back up and tell us your Orangeville story?

Yeah, it's not super interesting or anything, but— It's

always interesting.

I have a background in macroeconomics and finance. Started working for a Big Four auditing firm as a consultant in 2000. 17. No, it was 16. The official title is consultant in the risk department. Very related to auditing banks. Bunch of different projects. Worked in the Netherlands for about a year or two. And it was during that time that I had a lot of time living in a hotel. That was during 2017. It was a crazy, crazy market, right? During spring, I got interested. There were, there were 2 stories that, uh, one, I had one colleague there who, they started investing €60 a month with a couple of friends in a whole bunch of coins. Right. There was another colleague that did the same, but they just saved money with the idea of creating a bit of a fund and then doing more, doing something fun with it. So I put those 2 together and started doing that too with 7 of us, 7 of my friends, started saving €20 a month per person. Not huge amount, but that was good to like avoid all the traps during that period. Yeah, classic story, right? Was super hard to avoid all the shitcoins during 2017. You didn't really know enough about it to really understand why it was all bullshit, but there was something there. I knew there was something there and I had to study. And you just continue reading a lot of podcasts. Half of the time didn't really understand what they were talking about, but you just persevere and it becomes more clear. Yeah, bear market in 2018, but I just started reading more and more about Why Bitcoin, the only one that really matters? It's a process. It takes time, right? Then in 2019, it took a full year before I started running my own node, early 2019. But by then, I was— all the reading just changed my thinking, and I couldn't really continue doing what I was doing. So I quit my job. In March 2019, really the depths of the of the bear market there, I started reading a lot, writing, and traveling also with my now wife. I wanted to do something with Bitcoin, but like so many people, it's not easy, especially with the skills that I had. They didn't really add value in Bitcoin. If you're not a developer, it's hard. Then it was already 2020 and somehow started translation of the Bitcoin Standard. Only had a small part in that. And then I saw there was a project manager that was there for 3 days at Consensus and he had to go. He left after 3 days and I thought, okay, this is something I can do. Let's message Niko. And yeah, now I'm here. Been an interesting journey since then. There's a lot left to be done with ConsenSys.

Yeah, that's a pretty similar story to mine, actually. And I think a lot of people have similar stories or inspirational stories. But the interesting point to me is that you actually quit your fiat job and fiat life, as I understand, the same way that I, I quit— well, I quit my fiat life a little bit before. I tried a bunch of different things before landing into ConsenSys Network. Like, I, I started 2 different, uh, Starfish organizations, uh, with, with a bunch of other people, and we were kind of like finding the way of how, how to do this like properly and I guess by accident, consensus seemed to work out because everybody's just focused on doing what they like instead of trying to make it like top-down and, and have like a finalized idea or product in mind. Yeah, things, things go the way they go, and, and then you, you start to Focus on just the things that are important to you, and and then other people who resonate with that idea just like you did join in and start doing the same thing. And and I guess that's how you start a you don't really start a starfish organization. Let's put it that way. Another one was Weconomy, which is like an everything app, like a marketplace, almost like an eBay, but on Bitcoin economy that you could just list your products or your services and, and trade them for Bitcoin. It was a very ambitious idea and project, and it still hasn't been done by anybody for a good reason, probably because it will get shut down in no time. It's very difficult to, um, have some kind of a Bitcoin trading platform without getting into, into a lot of trouble. So that— we couldn't make that work either. A lot, a lot of good ideas, but without implementation, idea is pretty worthless in a way. So I guess what we both saw in translating Bitcoin books and Bitcoin Standard specifically—that's how how we got started—was to let people know what we knew, what we found out. And, and there's a lot of, a lot of interest in this. Like, you wouldn't think that translating fringe books into fringe languages would be a, a good business idea, but that was, that was just, uh, the business. I guess the business was not the, the first thing in, in our minds. It was just getting this information out and providing a valuable service, and that's, that's what we're building on.

It's also important that you get some feedback on what you're doing. Like I said, I was starting my own blog. I was an anonymous profile writing about Bitcoin, not that much people reading it. So that was a welcome change that the translation of the Bitcoin Standard You're working together with other people. And I think that's something that the Fences Network offers all these different people working alone. Maybe they can— we can bundle forces more and people can join a community of people who are already doing that, writing about it, translating stuff. So And I was also at that time doing a lot of self-hosting in the Bitcoin ethos, trying to set up my own Nextcloud and my node I had already set up earlier. And then when I started project management, I thought, yeah, I can do more here because I noticed that you were a bit overwhelmed and You brought in a lot of different people. There were like 9, 10 people helping out on different aspects. And yeah, I thought I can do more in here. First few months I paced myself a bit and I was only doing the project, trying to limit my time. But then in March of last year, I just said, I just want to do more here. I'm going to start contributing pretty much full-time. And I think that's an important thing that, like, it's a bit of a hurdle if you want to work in the space and on Bitcoin projects. You often just have to start. It's not like there's an interview and you get a contract with salary, right? It doesn't really work like that, especially not with the startup organization, like, yeah, like, in the sense of like growing a lot and not that much budget for a lot of different roles. So yeah, you have to build out your own niche a bit and try to add value wherever you can.

Yeah, it takes a lot of faith to go full-time in something like this when, you know, we all have bills to pay and when there's no certainty of any kind of salary, you either have to have like a side income or a fiat job or, or some, which is, which is the case for most Starfish. I, I think we, we have kind of like a lot of people doing some freelancing or just helping out on their free time. But there's not many who do this full-time. Maybe, maybe only the 2 of us. And Yeah, I think it takes a very special kind of a mindset to see the value in accumulating kind of this reputational, reputational informational capital that is going to pay out in the long term. It's not only about altruistically just sacrificing yourself. It's more like building something that is lasting, like a company. that is going to create future, uh, cash flow. So it's a big risk, of course, and, and to be able to do that, you have to fully believe in the mission and, and believe that we can make it work and that there will be a, a lasting demand for, for the service, which I think we, we both share. Uh, that was my idea from the beginning, like, well, Bitcoin interest in Bitcoin goes up, the number go up, and well, then people want to learn more about this topic and, and read those books. And to make them available in, in languages, different languages, because not everybody is, uh, good enough in, in English to be able to fully understand those original books that are very important. I mean, personally, I, I read books only in English. But I still started specializing in translation because I want everybody to have access to this knowledge. And I guess that's the core of what we're doing still to this day, even though we are already expanded into English titles and a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, I definitely want to keep keep that, uh, the translation as a core value and the localization of the content as a core value of, of the company going forward as well. Even though some of the translations, they're not going to make any money anytime soon, maybe, maybe in the long enough run. But yes, we are, we're far, far away from any kind of mainstream adoption for Bitcoin, let alone Bitcoin books. Like, people in general don't, don't read books, uh, non-fiction books anyway. So it is kind of like, um, could be very hard to see the, the value proposition unless you've, you've gone through kind of like the, the thought process that, that we both have. And it's rare to find people like you, and that's, that's why it's so great to find like-minded people. And for me personally, it's the best crowd of people that I've ever worked with, and I don't want to work with anybody except Bitcoiners anymore. Like, it's— there's, there's no point to me In doing that, like you can always make a case that because Bitcoin price is low, I would be good to mine fiat and be in a fiat job and keep stacking sats. I don't blame anybody who does that. It's a very reasonable thing. But yeah, I applaud anybody who sees the vision and thinks that this is an even better use of time than simply stacking sats to stack the reputational capital and to stack the sort of sweat equity that we, we are running on, and then in the hopes to cash, cash in that later. I mean, we're not a nonprofit, even though we're currently— technically we are a nonprofit because we're not making profit yet. But that's not the goal. Like, it's, it's just, uh, like any startup, you know, it takes time to build out. And I think what we're building here is, is starting to be pretty resilient. We have more than 60 titles under our belt now. Runeform 1 in, in, uh, 2019 when I started the company. So the library is expanding. The library is always going to be there, static content that would— that we poured our time and sweat into. And if, if you believe that Bitcoin is going to make it, and even if it doesn't, we'll still have a publishing business that can be repurposed to something else. So it's kind of like a you know, stacking this reputational capital and sweat equity instead of, of Satoshis. And if you can see that it's, it's more worthwhile to do that, then that's, that's your choice of action. And, and yeah, like what I like to say about this, uh, holding Bitcoin versus wielding Bitcoin— this is, this is the definition of wielding Bitcoin. So investing your time and resources and your, your Satoshis into something that you think is going to bring a big, bigger return one way or another in a longer time horizon?

What you said about repurposing the publishing business, I think that's an interesting question. I thought about 2 rules. Let's say we're right about this and go to a future where Bitcoin is the money, then you don't really need Bitcoin information because like the goldfish in water, right? It's just there. Everyone needs the Bitcoin. So how does consensus look to you in that world?

Well, in that, like, let's say that we go to in some kind of a Bitcoin standard. I think the demand for Bitcoin knowledge is still not going to go down because there's always going to be more people, new people. New people are born every day, right? I mean, within 20 years, there's going to be new people who's going to want to learn about Bitcoin and it's how the technology works. Granted, that's not ever going to be the majority. Like most people, I don't believe ever are going to be interested, just like people are not interested how internet works. They're not out lining to get books about how how internet protocol works or programming or any any of that. However, some people are, and and once it becomes mainstream, that amount that pool of people, no matter how small the amount of from the total people in the world, that that might be it. It's still a viable business. It's just going to be still fringe literature compared to something like Harry Potter or or you know that kind of books or Lord of the Rings. We're never going to be be there necessarily, but we're still going to have specialized books on specialized topic that is going to be mainstream. So so there there will be in in that case if if Bitcoin succeeds. But I always like like to remind people that it's it is possible that Bitcoin doesn't succeed. So I'm also planning for that. And well, my bet is that books. They have been around for quite a, quite a long time, and they have a huge Lindy Lindy effect. So I don't think knowledge consumption in that form, in book form, is going to go anywhere anytime soon. To me, makes makes perfect sense. It's like it's a win-win situation with Consensus Network because even if Bitcoin doesn't work out, we still have the publishing house. And we can still publish books about economics or whatever, you know, like Austrian economics, which is something that I'm looking to expand to, um, more kind of like self-help books— how to, how to, uh, increase your, your freedom and, and your liberty, how to, how to kind of like exit this fiat life, what are the tools to use. And, and books are great, uh, tools, uh, to accumulate this kind of information. And no matter what happens, there's always going to be information that we want people to have and that people need. So in that sense, like, there's only— it's just a matter of, of us adapting into the challenges in, in the future. And we already have built a pretty solid working company in publishing books, and it's I guess, a long enough time horizon, we just become another publishing company. But with a very important difference is that we operate on the starfish principle, which is nothing new. Like, it's not like we invented this concept. Like, it's a lot of companies, like Amazon included, started as a starfish organization. And by the way, you should check out a book called Starfish and Spider: The Power of Leaderless Organization, which was one of the most influential books that I read. And then that's why I started all this. I tried to make it work in different projects because I realized that even in my fiat life, I was already that kind of starfish leader. I always led my teams from the trenches, like from within and not from top down. And I found success in even in my fiat life with that method. I just didn't know what to call it. It was, uh, it was always there. So I think that's something very fundamental to human action and human cooperation and division of labor, to focus on the— your specific skill set, what you're good at. And and then inspire others rather than command others. And I realized my role in the world, not just in Bitcoin world, but in general, is a catalyst to to provide these frameworks that that I think are good that other people can use and then grow into in into this organization. by using their, their own, uh, specific skill set. Like, for example, you, you can come from a project management and, and the financial background, so you have a specific skill set that you've accumulated, and now you can put it into use in, in this kind of a starfish organization and probably several others going forward. So I, I think that's going to be not only for this specific company, but in general in the future. I think the future of businesses and companies is going to be much more distributed, much more— maybe even somebody might say chaotic. But it's, it's not like we lack hierarchy. Like, hierarchy is always important, uh, in, in a company to be able to know who is who is going to be in charge of which part of the operation so that we don't just always, like in a boat, we don't want to be rowing in different directions. Everybody's rowing in the same direction, but everybody has a different role in the boat, so to speak.

It's also a natural consequence of the overview that you have of the information that you have of all the facets. Inside Contentos Network right now and the publishing business that we have right now. Like, and we don't— I think we need to do a better job at communicating all the different aspects better. We focused a lot on translators and translating everything, and that's what we know. But like you said, everyone has specialties and I think there's a lot more that Samfi Network can do and that we need help with and that can build out more aspects of the business like audiobooks marketing or local connections with bookstores. There's a lot, a lot to do, right? I think we need to try and start Communicating that better this year should be a priority for us and something I'm going to focus on. And yeah, it's hard. It's hard to see at the beginning. The same like Bitcoin grown as a sort of underground network. I have a similar feeling with what we're building here with Consensus. Build a network of people. In a bunch of Telegram groups. And that's the strength of consensus, but it's not digital. And yeah, I think it's just a start. That's the most important thing that we have. We have a sort of like a machine that can boil oil. We're just a platform that can connect all different people. Want to do something. Yeah, I think we've come a long way already and I'm looking forward to this year, what we have, when we can start. I think this year we will be able to expand a bit more and show more of those other aspects.

Yeah, yeah, that's one, one reason for this podcast, to shed some light on how we actually operate and, and to give the stand also to other, other Starfish and, and hear their stories. And my, my, uh, vision is that I'm successful once I've made myself unnecessary to the operation. Like, it's— it doesn't mean that I'm ever going to leave the company or, or anything is too important. But I also don't want it to be depending on me. Like, if anything would happen to me, then I want the company to go on. And that's a very important part of the Starfish organization, not only the resilience but actual antifragility. So it will just grow stronger over time and with adversity. It will, it will, like a starfish, when you cut it into half, it becomes 2 starfish. So whenever we have challenges, we just adapt and reassess. And yes, it's maybe, maybe sometimes chaotic, or it can be slower than, than in a top-down spider organization, which is very clear and very efficient when, when you have a clear goal. But we don't really have a clear goal. Like, our goal is to further education in this specific topic right now, but that goal may, may have to change with the times. We can't hold on to it, uh, if, if things change. Um, I mean, nobody knows the future, so if, if we're not able to evolve around it and develop around it, then, then we're going to fail, and then we will become just another spider organization, and I try to avoid that. But, but yeah, of course, uh, we do have a kind of a spider organization because we still live in fiat land and, and we have to have licensing and contracts with the, with suppliers and, and so, so on. So we do actually do have a company. But yeah, I don't know, maybe, maybe in the future that becomes less relevant. Like, I would say, like, if, if I wasn't into publishing I would probably never even start a company. Like, uncorporated Bitcoin companies are my favorites, and you can probably do that with a software project. But we are still working— like, we are very heavily tied to meatspace, and meatspace is almost completely tied into the fiat world. So we kind of bridge also— like, you can think of ConsenSys Network as a bit of a bridge between fiat world and the Bitcoin economy or Bitcoin world. Where, where we, uh, bridge these two together in, in a way that allows more people in to move slowly away from fiat. Because it's not like an overnight thing. You just decide that, okay, I'm done with fiat. I mean, I guess for some people it could be, but a lot of people are heavily invested in, in the fiat life. They have families to support, and, and to be able to Earn a living wage on Bitcoin is tough in any kind of a company right now. But yeah, that's that's the direction we're going.

Yeah, just because of the physical nature of books, right? Those but in principle for content contributors that translate and make books for the part that's not. Physical, don't really need a company. But of course, yeah, for the physical book, we need to meet a situation. But I think there we also, we're also really growing a network of like-minded hubs, or we're working, we're working a lot with Bitcoiners actually for distribution more and more in different countries. So we're also really building, building network. To distribute. So if we ever want to, somehow it becomes impossible for us to operate in fiat world, we would still have those connections, right? That's another important part of consensus that we need to keep in mind and design decisions, I guess, that we also want to be ready for that.

Yeah, definitely. Like, we always want to be a few steps ahead of of possible deplatforming in any form. Like, for example, Amazon could deplatform us and shut us down, or our meatspace distribution partners can decide to deplatform us. Both of those things have happened in the past. So yeah, it's something that we are working on, building this meatspace distribution network of our own. Like, that's, that's the long-term goal, definitely. So then we, we can't be deplatformed. And, and like, one thing is the physical books, but the information of those books, it's already kind of decentralized, and it's in multiple, on multiple servers and computers. Like, the, the work is done already. Like, um, all of the books are stored in, uh, well, right now they're on my, my private GitHub. But in theory, I mean, we have some intellectual property fiat things to worry about, but in, in theory, we could make all of those books and all of those translations open source and, and take pull requests for, for them from, from the public. And, and in that case, anybody could keep, keep doing this. And then, you know, maybe one day we'll have our own printing operation somewhere, um, which could be shut down, sure, but it's, it's going to be increasingly difficult if, if we have more these distributed hubs, like you put it, these starfish hubs. It's kind of like Bitcoin network, like you can't really go and bomb every node to, to eradicate Bitcoin. Like you would need some kind of like a solar flare event or a global EMP to To shut down all the nodes, and and even in that case, that's where we go back to like these physical books because those are actually already printed and they are around. Like to be able to destroy what we we build and what we created will be immensely difficult task, if not impossible.

A very actionable way to help further Bitcoin adoption already. When you're on your own writing articles about Bitcoin, you don't really get feedback on it. But now you see books being printed, they go in the wild. People may not read them, but at least the information is out there, right? But one, yeah, one thing I do struggle with a bit sometimes is the licenses. You know, we talk about Okay, someday maybe we want to open source that. That's not entirely clear in my head yet how we're gonna move to such a model and how that would work. But yeah, falling down the rabbit hole, it's also a side rabbit hole where intellectual property, everything should be open source, right? So I think, yeah, we should, we should start with that and already, uh, see what content we can make available as free content.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's, there's already authors like Gigi, for example, who, who did the 21 Lessons open source from the get-go. Like, like, he clearly gets it. And I think more and more authors are, are going to go that way. Like, there's no reason not to. Yeah, of course everybody wants to, wants to get paid for, for their work in one way or another. I guess this goes back to the whole idea of reputational capital. And for example, this bootleg copy, copies that are going to be available of every single book, like you can't stop it. Like you can't stop information. You can put in place all kinds of, uh, DRM, like digital rights management tools for, for ebooks, but it's, it's never— somebody's going to circumvent that. And it's going to be out in the open if the book is good enough, of course. So I, I think it's just a, a matter of time, a, a switch in mindset. Right now we, we still have to accommodate the wishes of, of the authors. Like if they don't want the book to be freely available, we can't really overrule them and, and do that for them. But maybe, yeah, you're right, we, we should start pushing for it at least and, and make that option available. And like I said, I've been already saving them in, in, uh, in a GitHub. So technically that would be possible today to open source all of our books, but practically, uh, we, we need to onboard and, and make sure that everybody's okay with that before we, before we do that. We can't just decide to do that as a publisher. And, uh, yeah, of course, another thing is that some authors have already signed contracts with, with traditional publishers. So then we are in contract with those publishing houses, which are oftentimes these really, uh, dinosaur-style spider organizations who are protecting their intellectual property really carefully. And it's, it's just one of those fiat things that are going to be increasingly fading away. But, uh, yeah, at the moment we are kind of like trying to bridge the gap between Open information and and providing good enough service that we can actually get paid no matter if the information is available for free, which it should be in my my opinion. Like I I think it's not taking away from the from the business model; it's actually adding to the business model because similarly to like pirate software, like I've I've always been a an advocate of of pirate software. Even though I, at the moment, I use a lot of paid software too. And that's kind of like the whole point. Like when you, when you're starting up, when you're starting a new business or you're young and, and, uh, you know, you're dropping off high school and you want to start doing stuff, you don't really have any, any money to pay hundreds of euros for, for licenses. So you get pirate software and then you, you learn your trade and you become really good at it. And then when you start your business and then Well, you probably want the latest updates and you want the latest, latest software. So you, and you have the cash flow to pay for that. So that actually feeds into, into the business model in the long enough time horizon. So I think this kind of like intellect guarding intellectual property is kind of counterproductive. And, but it's, it's, it's a, it's a long process to, to get over that. And to, for people to see the, the long-term value. Because if you make a software, you make a book free right away, then of course the immediate thought is, okay, nobody's gonna buy this, nobody's going to pay me for this, I'm just gonna make it available for free. But especially for books, I think like what we are offering is, is, uh, an experience, a service. Like you get a physical book, it's different. Like it's not that you, you can't get a physical book for free. And even for ebooks, we offer a service like you, you can get, uh, get it downloaded very easily through a platform and read it on your device instead of finding it somewhere for free or reading it on a web page or a PDF. It's a different service. And audiobooks are also the same. So I guess, um, some kind of a service model for books instead of like simply selling the physical or, or, uh, electronic books. Uh, maybe, maybe a little bit more about the, the software that we use, because that's something that you've been working, working hard on and developing. Like, I, I started with only using open source software, um, well, partly out of necessity because, um, I didn't have any money when, when I started, and partly because of the ideology I wanted to, to use. I didn't want to use Google and Microsoft and Apple software. I, I wanted to use those ones that are, are free and open source. And I think the open source tools are getting really good. They're, they're still not at the productivity level of like the Spider organization produced tools, which is what we currently use because they're just more efficient. But there, I think there's a lot to be said about that development as well. And, you know, like you mentioned the Nextcloud before, like we're using that instead of Google Drive for sharing the work and collaborating. And there are a bunch of other software-related developments. Maybe you can go into that a little bit.

Yeah, I like it, the Nextcloud. I don't know if everyone else is using it or super happy with it. It takes a bit more effort to realize it. People are used to their Google products, right? And they're— yeah, we have to be honest. They have a good product, right? But I think we need to be true to the ethos of Bitcoin. Like I said, what I was spending a lot of time when I started last year on just doing that on my own, and I just saw opportunities. And also because of the nature of our organization, we have a lot of people, software, paid software, just becomes prohibited. So we're kind of forced to look for those things open source. There's also other parts of our business where our webshop, for instance, there we made a different choice. So it's an ongoing process. For my personal life, I noticed that I kind of go in phases. Sometimes I focus a lot on owning and The open source version. Yeah, I have to be honest that I think my productivity sometimes drops a little bit and then I go back a bit, but bit by bit I think the software becomes better and you have to use the tool.

Right. Yeah. I mean, you have to pick your battles to some extent. Like, I also had to start using Adobe software because of the productivity increase. And in, like, I don't, I don't say that spider organizations or, or centralized software is bad per se. Like, that's, that's how you get a top, top-tier service, right, with a centralized party in charge and developing it. But there's caveats that you need to be aware of that. Like, for example, when you're working with sensitive data And you don't really know how they handle it, and you don't know what they what they do with your stuff. So you got to be aware of those things. And moving forward towards Bitcoin standard, I think what we're gonna see is just better, better centralized companies, like better custodian services, better software companies that are going to be providing better, better alternatives because the open source software is so powerful now. Like they won't be able to compete with that. And the only way to compete with that is just simply providing better service with the, with the upsides of, of open source software. So maybe a centralized company can make their software, which a lot of companies do already, to make their software open source but still keep, keep it, uh, keep developing it like a centralized company and just providing a But better service.

There's a role for consensus there, I think, too, as sort of an aggregator of the content. Because yeah, that's part of what we do, right? You're curating or aggregating content. But yeah, then I also wonder, like, what is the difference between aggregating, curating, and censoring? Well, we, in the past, we've had shitcoiners reach out to us that want to get their book published, right? But yeah, then we're censoring that basically by saying, yeah, sorry, no, don't do that. But I think that that's, uh, that is somewhat— that is a role that I see for ConsenSys in the future, that we, that we are somewhat of an aggregator of, of the information that we think is is important that we want people to read. But yeah, I don't know, it's not the— I don't know if I'm really super comfortable with that position right now, like at least not on my own, right?

Yeah, I get what you mean. Like censorship kind of has this bad ring to it for a good reason, because usually it means that we're— some— somebody is trying to suppress some information and make it unavailable. And I think what a lot of people confuse is freedom of speech versus moderation or curation, like, like we are doing. So like, for example, ConsenSys is a, is a platform, and the platform has moderators. It's a, it's a private company, just like, for example, Twitter. Like, Twitter gets, gets blamed, uh, for censorship all the time because it's so big. It's the time, uh, town square of, of the internet. That's, that's what they say. So, so people confuse this like freedom of speech and the rules and the contracts of a platform. So we have rules, like we have editorial guidelines at ConsenSys. We can't just make everybody's information available. That's what internet does, right? I mean, you're free to start your own platform. But if you choose to join a platform, you have to abide by the rules of the platform. And that's not censorship. That's just a contract that you agree to, or you're free not to agree to. You still have your freedom of speech. You just can't have the freedom of speech on that platform. So I think that's, that's a source of a lot of, a lot of the confusion. And yes, we are doing censorship in that sense that we're not going to make everybody's voice available through our platform. However, that does not impede their freedom of speech because they don't have freedom to publish anything they want on our platform because we make the rules. And you don't have to agree with our rules. Then you just, you can do it on your own or use a different platform.

Yeah, but it's a very delicate line to walk even inside Bitcoin only, there are still certain ideas that may or may not be accepted. Or yeah, it's just a weird position.

Yeah, I mean, like, let's think about Bitcoin for a second. Like, it's often Bitcoin proponents say that Bitcoin is a censorship-free platform, but actually it's just censorship-resistant. So that doesn't mean that in Bitcoin network there's no ability to censor transactions, for example. There is. It's just, uh, it allows that. It, it can handle it. It can handle bad actors. Censorship as, as it is, it can never be eradicated. Like, that would be censorship, right? I mean, it's censorship in a way is, is, uh Within freedom of speech, like you you can say that you can't say that you can't ban somebody from banning somebody because that's free that's freedom. Like you have the freedom to act retardedly. Like you you that's that's your freedom and you know I'll I'll die protecting that hill of freedom of speech. Like you you have the right to. Make bad calls and carry the responsibility and the weight of, of those calls. And I guess our role is just to do what we think is right, and not everybody's ever going to agree, and that's fine. That's, that's not what consensus is. Consensus is not that everybody agrees. It's just something that enough people gravitate towards. And just like Bitcoin, like, not everybody— most people don't agree with the value proposition of the network. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist and doesn't provide value just to those who, who want to use Bitcoin or those who want to use consensus. They are free to do so within the rules of, of the, of the network.

Rough consensus. We need, we need to improve on, on, on a lot of aspects, I think.

Yeah, I mean, for sure. I mean, we've been operating only for a little bit over 3 years, so it's, uh, it's a startup. We're only, only getting started, and seems like every year is crazier than the last one. I don't know, we'll see. I'm, I'm just excited to be on, on this journey, and I'm nowhere near done. I mean, only, only getting started, and People like you joining in, it just makes me completely bullish about not only Bitcoin but also entrepreneurship in general, life in general. Like what we can build together with division of labor and you know freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of doing whatever the hell you want to do without anybody telling you can't do that. And we'll just we'll just find more people who agree. With, with what we think is right, and we change our model all the time. We change our rules all the time once we get more data, more people join the network. Just like Bitcoin, it's, it's not like it's, it's the same as, you know, 10 years ago. It keeps evolving, and new challenges emerge, new, new attack vectors, new, new needs in the from the market emerges. So we adapt to those, and that's, that's beautiful. It's, it's organic. It's just life. Maybe we can wrap up with, uh, your vision for ConsenSys. What, what are you most excited about, and what are you developing, and what are you working on right now?

So for this year, I hope that we can really, um, move the project management to new candidates. In their different language regions where we have people that we trust, the editors and project managers that I hope that I can give that a bit away and focus on some other things, mainly accounting in the coming weeks and months. Try to give more visibility into our operation to the important people who are working for us. I mean, they deserve that information. So we need to give it. So yeah, from the accounting system then also flows more options where we can move to more frequent payouts for contributors and authors. I think that's a really important thing that we need to get done this year and moving from paying once a year to contributors towards monthly. Of course, there's like when you work with Amazon, they delay and you have to wait until the end of the month. But the more we go towards audiobooks on our own platform, ebooks, and we can actually start moving towards even faster payouts if we have that whole system in place. So we could theoretically— Lightning would enable us to basically stream the sats when When ebooks or audiobooks are sold, it could go straight to all the parties involved. A bit like the value-for-value model that people, all the hype, but we do have a role in that. There is stuff we can do or we can experiment with. I'm not sure how it's gonna look, but it's something that we should explore. And then, yeah, how does ConsenSys look? Well, we need to focus more on the original titles. Yeah, yeah. It's new for us, right? We've only done 2 to 3 now, so I think we have a lot to prove. But I already see some key starfish coming up that are going to help us there. And yeah, we need to build out that market, show to the world that we offer value to authors and just continue to build, continue to focus on quality. And I think we need to also get more graphic designers involved and like make every book really a piece of art. Yeah, there's just so much. It's too much. There's too much to do, but that's what makes it fun, right? And we'll see. We'll see where we end up. Also non-Bitcoin books doing more. Yeah, the obvious topics are Bitcoin, economics, freedom, but there's so much more that is tangential to Bitcoin where we also Could be like a venue where like the ideas that don't get get published elsewhere, like or about health or about agriculture or privacy or I don't know. Just yeah, there's a lot to do, right? And I hope we can find more people that join us. It's not easy during the bear market, right? The interest from from star faces correlated to the price, so. But yeah, the people we have now, if you're with us now, I think it says a lot about why you're in this and it's a good place to be. We have a great team and yeah, I just hope we can keep everyone involved and first focus is to give more information about how we operate and some more insights into, uh, to the numbers that, uh, would back that internally. That's what I'm focusing now.

Yeah, well said. Um, it is kind of overwhelming sometimes. There's— it seems like there's more and more work that needs to be done. And, uh, in the bear market, I've actually been happy with the, with the engagement that we've been getting and new people coming in, especially for original works. Maybe the translation side has been dying down with the, with the Bitcoin price a little bit, but that's to be expected. Um, I, I think going forward, the people who, who truly get what we're doing here, they will emerge, especially in the bear markets, because it's mostly signal out there, and, and mostly people are focusing on building. That's what I like about bear markets. And when once the bull market is there, there's a lot of, uh, hype and excitement. And maybe people buy books and then put them in the shelves and, and never read them. But, and, and people are more inclined to spend their sats when, when the price is going up, obviously. But that being said, I've, I've been happy to— like, last year was surprisingly good considering everything. And, and I think, um, yeah, we're doing just fine. More people are joining in.

That's a, a really good point. It feels like it's, it's a bear market only in price, when just not about consensus, but when you see the activity that is going on everywhere, so much to do and all on all fronts. And by the end of the year, things are gonna look completely different again.

Yep, looking forward to that. So for the end, do you want to share any any details of if people want to get in touch with you, your Twitter or anything like that?

Yeah, my Twitter handle is Sovereign Hodl or Sovereign Hodno. Can't ignore me now. So yeah, that's the only place if you want to reach out. You can find me there or in the ConsenSys network. All right, cool.

Yeah, on Telegram. Everybody who's in our Telegram groups probably knows Tibor already.

Yeah, I live there.

Yeah, yeah, same with me. All right, Tibor, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining in, and, and thank you for joining ConsenSys. Couldn't, couldn't do this without you, definitely.

Yeah, thanks for having me on and talk later.

Yep.

Bye-bye.

Bye.